How do you get over anger towards someone who leaves your spirit uneasy?

Without getting into the terminology here “leaving your spirit uneasy” I think we’re just talking about a fairly typical experience. A general experience that everyone has from time to time. That you have some interaction with someone and they upset you, they disturb you, in some way or another. Maybe they criticize you, generally that hurts. They say, my mother taught me actually “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”. Unfortunately words do often hurt people, really badly in many cases.

So how to get over anger toward someone who disturbs you. This could be the subject for a whole lecture. It’s quite a subject. Let me give you an interesting perspective. I’m not saying this is just the solution but it’s an interesting perspective on this type of subject. It’s from our point of view, we say Hare Krishna or Krishna conscious point of view.

We understand there is a thing called karma. Karma basically means action and reaction. Two things, the activity you do and the result you get from the activity. Not as two separate things but two parts of one thing. In other words when you do the action you will get the reaction, it’s not optional. It’s not that you could dodge the reaction or buy your way out of the reaction or talk your way out of the reaction. Once you do the action you will get the reaction. It’s like when you have a coin, you have the heads side and the tails side. You can’t say I will take the heads side and you take the tails side. When you got the coin you have both sides. When you do an activity the reaction will come sooner or later. Think in these terms for the sake of an example in this discussion.

Why would it be? How could it be? That someone would abuse you psychologically, verbally, emotionally. How could you find yourself in such a situation that someone is getting on your case and it’s hurting you? According to this concept of karma it would be because you previously upset someone and now you’re just getting the reaction. You know what they say in the good book right? “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” I forget the verse number but it’s in the Bible, which is the same idea. It’s karma being expressed in a slightly different way.

If someone gives you a hard time or if someone gives you a good time. Or whatever happens to you. Good, bad, indifferent etc. it’s all coming based on how we’ve acted in the past. If you’re in a situation where someone has hurt you, you can understand actually it’s my responsibility. It’s not that it just happened, out of nowhere, just happened by chance. No, it’s connected with my previous activities. The idea is karma, you do something and you get a reaction, when the reaction is finished that whole event is finished. You get your reaction, someone gives you a hard time, but that means we would say, you just burnt up that karma. It’s finished.

Now if you take responsibility, if you try and see it from that perspective. You can in that mood of being responsible, being progressive; you can see how to avoid doing things like that in the future and see how to create a bright future by acting positively. Even ultimately, this is going into another area here. If you engage in transcendental spiritual activity, means basically the service of God, then you can get free from all you karma and you come to the spiritual level which is beyond the level you would be on if you make a practice of doing good, being nice, being positive and in that way creating a materially brighter future.

That’s a suggestion. I’m talking about how you can go beyond. See it, that you’re burning your karma from your previous bad activities and from now on act positively to create a positive future.